Paris, the city of lights is
also known for having more hotels than any other single town. Telling
the history of its first class hotels or illustrating the full body of
its luggage labels would need a knowledge much more encyclopedic than
mine, a site much larger than I have, and certainly a much, MUCH more
comprehensive collection than my own. So, I decided to make a cut in 1910
and illustrate a choice of labels of the most important Parisian hotels
of the time as well as a few others of particular interest.

In the beginning there was
the London Exhibition of 1851 and the French wish to do it better and
on a greater scale than their neighbors. The successive and increasingly
ambitious Universal Exhibitions held in Paris in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889
and 1900 were powerful motifs for urban development and a boost for the
hotel industry. But the origin of the modern Parisian hôtellerie
can be brought back to an earlier time, to the first Hotel Meurice, founded
before 1820. The hotel that existed in 1910 was the result of a total
reconstruction (in 1906-07) of the earlier hotel of the same name that
occupied several buildings in the Rue de Rivoli.

To
speak of Parisian hôtellerie in the XIX century is to speak of the
brothers Pereira (Péreire, in French), capitalists and entrepreneurs
extraordinaires. Of Portuguese origin, the Pereiras established themselves
first in Bordeaux and then in Paris where they soon made a reputation for
farseeing entrepreneurship.It
was the lack of proper lodgings in number to welcome the expected visitors
to the first Universal Exhibition to be held in Paris that lead emperor
Napoleon III to invite the Pereira brothers to build a grand hotel of majestic
proportions worthy of the reborn French Empire. The result was the Grand
Hotel du Louvre (1855).

The
Grand Hotel du Louvre reigned supreme for the better part of a decade until
it was superseded by a new endeavor by Emilio and Isaac Pereira, of which
more later.In 1875 the
hotel was sold to a departmental store (The Louvre Galleries) which gradually
cannibalized its premises in benefit of the store. In 1886 a hotel on the
opposite side of the Place du Palais Royal was bought for use as annex to
the Grand Hotel du Louvre and it is this annex, later expanded with the
acquisition of another contiguous hotel, that since 1887 carries the name
of Hotel du Louvre to this day.

The
next hotel that the society headed by the Pereira brothers built was to
be named "Grand Hôtel de la Paix" but there was another nearby hotel named
"Hôtel de la Paix" and its owners insisted on the exclusivity of the name.
So, the new hotel, completed in 1862, ended up named, simply, "Grand Hotel".
The 700-plus room leviathan was erected in only 15 months by working nights
under arc lighting- probably the first major construction work to use that
solution. Even larger and more luxurious than the Hôtel du Louvre, it was
the first hotel in Paris to boast a hydraulic lift. In 1878 one of the lifts
of the hotel fell from one of the upper floors on to the ground, killing
three. All Paris was moved by the terrible accident. At the turn of the
century the entrances were redesigned and the main entrance changed from
the Boulevard des Capucines to the Rue Scribe and the hotel acquired the
general appearance it bears to this day. Its Salle Des Fêtes is arguably
the most spectacular hotel banquet room in the world.

The Hôtel Continental was the
next major hotel to be built in Paris. It opened on June 6, 1878 in time
to attract business from visitors to the great Universal Exhibition of
that year.

As the train became more and
more a preferred means of transportation so the French authorities (always
with a flair for grandiose public works of a monumental nature) saw fit
to build new terminal stations and re-erect the extant on more ambitious
proportions. A number of Station Hotels sprung, naturally, from the new
conceptions of multipurpose station buildings that had been heralded by
the British. The most remarkable Parisian railway station hotels were
the Grand Hotel Terminus (1889) on the Gare Saint Lazare and the Palais
d'Orsay (1900) on the Gare d'Orléans (today Museum of the Quai d'Orsay).

Other remarkable
Parisian hotels founded before 1910 were the fabled Ritz (1898), the Elysée
Palace (also of 1898), the Majestic (1908) and the Hôtel de Crillon (1909,
but housed in a much earlier palace), the Athenée, located near
the Opéra, that opened in 1867 for the Universal Exhibition of that year
and the Plaza which, with the former would be in the origin of the famous
Plaza-Athenée of today.